Shifting Healthcare Costs

According to a recent editorial published in the New York Times (Shifting the Health Cost Burden, September, 2nd, 2010) "the latest annual survey of employer health benefits contains good news for the employers but bad news for their workers."
What are the good news? The average total premium for employer-sponsored health insurance (typically paid partly by employers and partly by their workers) rose only a modest 3 percent this year for family plans, reaching $13,770 in 2010.
What are the bad news? The employee share of their premium soared by 14% reaching almost $4,000, while the amount employers contributed did not increase.
Whats are the results?

* Employers shifted virtually all of the increased premium costs to their employees , who were in a weak position to resist in an economy where there were few other jobs to jump to.
* Since 2005, while wages have increased just 18 percent, workers’ contributions to premiums have jumped 47 percent, almost twice as fast as the rise in the policy’s overall cost.
* Meanwhile insurances are getting stingier and less comprehensive.
* Workers face higher deductibles, forcing them to pay a larger share of their overall medical bills. The Kaiser survey found a significant increase in the number of employees who had a deductible of at least $1,000, to 27 percent this year, from 22 percent in 2009. Almost half of workers who are covered by a small employer with fewer than 200 workers have an annual deductible of that amount.
* Increasing out-of-pocket expenses will almost certainly reduce the number of medical office visits, will force staff to collect deductibles at the point-of-care, or bill the patients and write off the increasing amount of unpaid bills. This will further decrease the margins in family medicine offices and force doctors to see more patients for less money!

What can we do? Facing very tight profit margins doctors must improve the efficiency of their offices, teach their staff to work as teams and advertise their medical services to those seeking cheaper medical services.
Instead of working harder we must work smarter. Yelling and screaming will not help us to move forward. We must learn to run our offices as small businesses and adapt quickly to the rapidly changing market place.

Yours
Bernd